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Muslim Writers

The Muslim Writers Awards continued into 2009. Building on the work of Birmingham Libraries where the Muslim Writers Awards was launched in 2007, this year's Awards were held on 17 June 2009 in London.
Further details can be found at: www.muslimwritersawards.co.uk

The 2008 Awards Ceremony was held at the ICC on 29 March with a great line up of guests and speakers including Jermaine Jackson, Randa Abdel Fattah (author of Does My Head Look Big in This?), who flew to Birmingham from Australia specially for the ceremony, James Caan (Dragon's Den), and Sarah Joseph.

The evening included entertainment from local performance poet Double, and music from Khaliq and Aa'shiq Al Rasul.

Birmingham Libraries were pleased to be working in partnership with Innovate Arts to host the city's second annual Muslim Writers Awards.

The Muslim Writers Project originated in April 2006 when we received funding from Europe to work with writers from this particular community group. The Awards were then conceived to showcase and highlight new literary talent from the Muslim community in Birmingham. What the Awards hope to achieve is get more writers from a black and minority ethnic background published by mainstream publishers.

The inaugural Awards ceremony was held on 28 March 2007 at the ICC in Birmingham and due to the overwhelming success of the awards and submissions we had, we decided to take the awards national. The idea of the project is to assist and nurture emerging writers and get them published. We are looking at the writers creative talent - not their religious beliefs. The Awards were televised and went out to 150+ countries and we hope to reach as many new writers (and readers!) as possible.

The categories for the 2008 Awards were:

Non Fiction

Short Story

Novel Award

Poetry Award

Under 16s

Best Children's Story

Best New Writer of the Year

Best Published Writer (to be nominated by publishers)

Publishers were invited to nominate books for the Best Published Writer and readers were asked to choose their favourite published (Muslim) writer.

What the project can do for you
The project will offer writers the following support:

editing support

creative writing courses

master classes

networking with other writers

publishing support

access to the Publishing Birmingham website (on which writers can upload their material)